Avast

I started to write this in a blog post on this site but I decided that the subject matter would be better served as a full-fledged article where you, the reader, could post comments or questions, if wanted.

   This past Tuesday I traveled to one of my relative's home to check on their 3 computers. All 3 of their computers had issues but one of them was so infected that I opted to bring it home with me because I have a small computer lab setup with several pieces of equipment that make it easier to work on PCs. These relatives are avid windows users and until I showed them Peach OSI, neither had heard of a Linux system, let alone used one. This particular computer could not be used at all for all the pop-ups and resources that were being used by the massive amount of viruses, trojans, worms, key loggers, malware - well you get the picture. According to Windows software Malewarebytes, there were over 8,000 pieces of malware on this 1 Windows PC. Malewarebytes took just over 2 hours to run to the point that it gave me that information and then the PC froze up - it was unable to handle all the open screens that the popups had brought to the surface. I've never heard of such an infected computer, let alone seen one and I've been working on computers for over 40 years. My relative is a retired photographer and as you can imagine he had a lot of important images on the infected PC as well as some important documents. In the hopes that my experiences with this PC might help someone else, I am writing this article to document what steps I had to take to return this computer to a usable state.